Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It

by Craig Taylor

  Stockbroker/DJ

  It’s past noon at the Costa Coffee in Buckhurst Hill, on the western edge of Essex. I’ve been speaking with Smartie for hours – and I’ve hardly asked a question. The mothers at a nearby table have stopped speaking to each other and are now listening in, listening to Smartie, while rocking their sleeping children in their prams, pushing them with their feet.

  The City life came to an end, I think, when it became an American environment. The City changed in the Eighties and Nineties to a new type of work regime where people didn’t lunch any more, you worked through your lunch, you worked at your desk. It was a sandwich culture. The English sort of London-type living, boozy lunches, that had gone out the window. That killed the character, the culture and the framework of what it was all about for me, and I got disillusioned with it.

  I was still looking for new fashions. By the early Nineties, all my suits had different colour linings, they weren’t just your normal City stockbroker. I used to have paisley linings. Always cut differently. Instead of maybe having a slit here, I’d have a flap pocket. Flaps here. Higher lapels. Cloth buttons, so you didn’t have just like plastic buttons. The buttons were covered in the cloth of the suit. Lapels that opened up. I mean this is way before anyone else was doing anything like this. The trousers would be cut very very tapered. Some of them would be jacked up. They’d be cut maybe two inches above the heel, so I’d show my socks off. No one was doing that then.

  Armani suits really was the defining look for most City boys. I’d be wearing tailored. But then I’d come from an insurance background, which was always very tailored anyway.

  They’d be wearing three-piece mostly, with a pocket watch with a chain. Even in the Nineties, there would be not many in the bowler hats. I suppose the bowler hats went in the late Seventies, early Eighties, that era, but it would be hard for you to find a man in a bowler hat now. Sometimes around Pall Mall and St James’s, you see the odd bowler-hat man coming out of one of the private drinking clubs, but there’s not many in the bowler hats these days.

  I’ll tell you another example. You take it for granted now that everybody wears square glasses, you know the 1960s glasses are very trendy now. But when I started to wear those fourteen years ago in the City, no one was wearing that look. They were all wearing the little round Armani glasses. I was wearing black National Healths. Really throwing it out. Big glasses. Just throwing the look. Just sort of, I would say, Michael Caine. The Ipcress File, that sort of Italian Job look. He would have been an icon for me. Because he had the charm, the East End, south-east London roughness, you know, cockney charm, but with that smartness like, you know, streetwise, edgy, but definitely London. He’s definitely London to me. Michael Caine is definitely London.

  My DJ-ing and my club promoting at that period had grown very big. That’s when I moved into the West End. I only wanted the biggest clubs in the West End to do my parties in. I had a strong crowd of about 500 or 600 people. I had a close friend at the time who was an actor who used to be in the TV programme EastEnders in the early days. He was a good-looking boy and the two of us together were, I suppose, a fantastic combination. There was me with my I-can-talk-for-England style, and my fun and love of music, and there was him with his good looks. He had a big following of women as well. There was me DJ-ing in these bars and I had a big following of girls, because girls loved my music. So with these nights we packed the clubs out and with us both working on the stock-market floor after his acting, he worked on the futures as well, we had a market place to sell our tickets for the parties. Before we even opened the door on our club nights, we’d sell 500 tickets in advance. So that would be revenue, even if the tickets say were £10 or £15 each. Somewhere between £5,000 to £6,000 before we even took any door money. Because we had the market. We had 3,500 people in a building, who all wanted to go out clubbing and partying. So we used that to our advantage. I remember our first club night. The club was called Tangerine Dream, because he had an obsession with this band that were from the Seventies called Tangerine Dream. Our first invite for our tickets were plastic credit cards, I’m sure you can work out what the credit cards were used for mostly; remember we were all stockbrokers. We were all in a trading environment, but there was obviously drugs going on at this period, too. A lot of cocaine was going on. And so we had credit-card invites for our parties and they were sold as tickets. Not paper tickets, you’d get a credit card for the party and Tangerine Dream in gold writing. No expense spared.

  It was mad. Mad. I mean, when we used to do a party, people used to work in trading booths on the floor for different companies, say Goldman Sachs and Barclays, all the different banks, and you’d go round and you’d have runners. These were the ones that used to run round and get the cards from the traders in the pit to process the orders. Because nothing then was screen-based, you had to input the cards, the trading cards, in the computer to match the trades with other traders. So if we were advertising a party you might get one girl who wanted to bring twenty of her friends from outside the market to the party and she’d buy twenty tickets, thirty tickets, I want fifty tickets, so you could sell 500 tickets in no time because obviously if you had a girl who worked on the stock-market floor she might have 20 girlfriends who wanted to meet stockbrokers. They’d all want to come to the party in the hope they might meet a rich man. And the rich guys wanted to come to the parties, and the boys I knew who were from rougher areas wanted to come because they knew all the good-looking girls who worked in the City were coming. So they all fed off each other. My parties were legendary because at the first party we did, which was at the Turnmills Club in Clerkenwell, which is still there but it’s now a restaurant, we had the dance studio at the back of Turnmills. We used to do that on a regular basis and we’d fill it out. We used to have two rooms: one was a house music room and the other room was my room, where I used to entertain my following of about 200 people with soul, disco and Balearic beats which was a mixture of rock dance music and Ibiza sounds. Early Ibiza music. It was 75 per cent girls at my parties.

  What I suppose I wanted to try and create was, in a diluted way, a Studio 54 event of hedonism where all your fantasies could be relived. That John Travolta feeling: it’s the weekend, let’s go out and have fun. So dressing up, buying a new outfit, talking about it for a month before you go to the party, getting excited. People used to get excited about the night.

  There was a lot of money around. We’d had another recession in the early Nineties, but when Tangerine Dream started in ’95 and ’96, there was a boom. That was when house prices were starting to rise. Stock markets were on a rollercoaster rally that really continued up to 9/11. The market was only one-way traffic. They were good times. No one worried. Everyone wanted to have fun. This, I think too, was really the peak of the designer thing. This was when all these labels that are now so famous like Vivienne Westwood, Comme des Garçons, they were at their height. People wanted the top clothes. It was all about buying expensive clothing from top designer stores that no one else could afford and wearing them to the parties.

  The women wouldn’t be wearing lots of clothes, but the Belgian designers were very big – Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester – Vivienne Westwood was very sexy clothing then. You had John Richmond, he was very big at that period. For menswear, Helmut Lang. Prada was starting to come in. Dolce & Gabbana before they were D&G, when it was very exclusive. Joseph. All the shops around Sloane Street were very popular. Harvey Nichols was an amphitheatre where people used to go.

  It was a designer frenzy then, because there was so much money around. Everyone wanted to wear the top looks, wanted to go to top house music clubs and that’s what brought on the superstar DJ thing. They had DJs like Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling, who was a friend of mine at the time, and then Boy George after Culture Club, he started to DJ, I knew him. They also started and it was all house music. There was warehouse parties, you know. It was slightly after acid house, which was really the late Eighties, early Ni
neties, it was now the garage scene. It was the superstar DJ thing and it was about expense. But, you know, there were some great warehouse and all-night parties. You had some big parties in London.

  The new money was there. I think everything was driven from the futures market and this East End-made-rich type environment. There was still a lot of real Londoners around. I think the turning point was when Shoreditch became super-trendy, when the art crowd moved in after the Millennium. The art crowd came in, fashion started to move in. A lot of these Indian takeaways that were in Brick Lane, they were pushed out. The top end of Brick Lane if you go down there now, it’s all fashion. The bottom end of Brick Lane is still all Indian, Bangladeshi restaurants, but in ten years’ time they may push all the rest of the Indians out.

  I loved the Shoreditch wave when it first started because it aped the real urban decay of the late Seventies and early Eighties. That’s what I saw in the Shoreditch regeneration and the crowd moving there, but it’s dead now. It’s finished really. It’s now a beano culture of let’s get trashed. It’s lovely for the kids, but I see the real happening places in London as being Kingsland Road, Stoke Newington. The other side of Dalston, which used to be the ‘murder mile’. I see the new cultures moving to places like Stratford, maybe. Bow. And it may even go as far as a real run-down place, like Leytonstone.

  So coming closer to me, I’m afraid, as the crowd gets pushed further out, as they look for the new thing, in the rougher parts of London. Again, it’s the full circle of everything that was first started in that period of 1978 onwards. To me 1978 is the change because it was the Winter of Discontent and that’s what changed everything. ’78, ’79, when Thatcher came, changed this country for ever really.

  PART III

  MAKING A LIFE

  They stand near the bar. They’ll eat their lunch elsewhere soon, Nick explains, somewhere in Liverpool city centre. They’ll be working in the Wirral in the afternoon, so it’s just a quick one or maybe one and a half before they get on with it. The half is looking more likely. Nick’s companion, John, swills the remainder in his pint glass, round and round.

  Nick holds his empty and says to me: ‘Londoners. What they are …’

  ‘And you should listen to him,’ John interjects, ‘because he’s been there, lived there.’

  ‘What they are …’ Nick announces.

  ‘He lived in some terrible places down there, had a terrible time.’

  ‘They are so far up their own arses,’ Nick says, above the clinking of the Blob Shop, which is full of a selection of Liverpool’s afternoon drinkers. Older men shuffle up to the bar in succession. ‘All that talk and talk and talk. They’re so far up that it even shows with their football clubs – they can’t help it. It’s in their name. Arsenal. Arse.’

  ‘To be fair, that’s not the only club in the city,’ says John.

  ‘They’ve got Chelsea too. What’s that got in it? Hell. Ch-hell-sea. You’ve got a Spur, an Arse, Hell. Millwall – another sort of hell.’

  ‘West Ham,’ John says.

  ‘Ham,’ Nick replies, disdainfully, but without explanation.

  John drinks. Nick taps his empty glass on the bar to get the attention of the staff.

  ‘He had something happen to him down there,’ John explains.

  ‘We don’t need to go into that.’

  ‘A terrible thing. Can’t even talk about what happened.’

  ‘Nothing happened,’ says Nick.

  ‘Won’t even speak about it. He just hates the place, London.’ On the television in the corner the 12.47 at Sunderland begins. Dogs erupt from the gates and charge across the screen.

  ‘There’s Crystal Palace too, you know,’ John says. ‘If you’re thinking of all the clubs.’

  ‘Sure,’ Nick replies. ‘Thing is, there’s no Crystal Palace though, is there? There’s no Crystal Palace in London. You can go down there and look for it but you’re not going to find a Crystal Palace.’

  ‘People say London was awful in the Seventies,’ says Barbara as we drive to the fox hunt just outside Grantham. ‘You couldn’t get petrol after a certain time. But I remember it as a glamorous place. There was always someone’s brother or someone’s school friend who could get you a table at Annabel’s. We wore long dresses when we went out. We wore long dresses for everything. They called us country. I’ll never forget that. I suppose we were.’

  It’s a clear March day at Belvoir Castle, home of the Duke of Rutland, built in the nineteenth century and pronounced ‘beaver’. Horseboxes are parked in rows in the parking lot so that ‘Caution: Horse’ is repeated in boldtype, over and over. An illustrated sign gives directions to Belvoir’s adventure playground, the strip for jousting and the rose garden in the grounds, but the attraction today is the final hunt of the season. Hunters in gleaming black boots and jodhpurs trot up the hill past the snowdrops growing by the side of the road. Glasses of port are laid out on the table for the hunters. The challenge is to hold the port aloft, to sit comfortably, with elegance, and not gulp when the horse’s head drops.

  Hounds are scattered amongst the waiting horses and riders, sniffing each other. They nip at the empty platters of sausage rolls and perch their paws on the low stone wall, eager for the attention of the gathered crowd.

  ‘I love seeing the hounds sitting around the feet of the hunters,’ says a man behind me. ‘He should really have more control,’ says his companion. ‘The huntsman should keep them near.’ Both are middle-aged; both wear mud-spattered wellies; both are eating sausage rolls, handed to them by a well-dressed young woman with a metal tray.

  ‘We are country,’ the man furthest from me says a little later. ‘We are not city.’

  ‘I do go to London,’ the other says. The word hangs in the air. ‘I do go to London, yes. Under sufferance.’

  JO THE GEORDIE

  Who stayed in Newcastle

  She has bleached blonde hair and seems to know everyone in Newcastle. She drinks tea after her morning coffee on a bright September day, the day Cheryl Cole got divorced and didn’t go back to using ‘Tweedy’.

  London is a vast and lonely place. If you go there you have to take a bit of Newcastle with you. You have to export pet names for people you don’t know. Pet, petal, flower, love, lover. My friend’s mum, who is old-school Newcastle, calls everyone my little darling, even if she’s just met them. In Newcastle, there’s a base-level love. In London the base feeling is that you’re either a terrorist, or a rapist, or both, until you’ve proven otherwise. You can feel a southern coldness on you when people look your way. Even if you come down with Newcastle words, they’re not always enough to sustain you.

  There is a Londoning process, a hardening that creeps up you. There was one man I knew, he came from a rough as arseholes neighbourhood and when he moved down he changed his accent. It happens. He came back up and said, [her voice changes] wow, this place has really changed. I remember when it was nowt but fields. Oooh, the quayside looks amazing, he says. He goes away, grows some pubes, and comes back to make that kind of comment. It’s a bit fucking irritating.

  There’s this thing you’re supposed to be part of in London. But what is it? That’s the million-dollar question. Everyone’s there because they’re searching, aspiring. A very small percentage is actually living the dream. Ill, tired, unhappy, the rent is fucking loads, what is it you’re getting? The idea of it, or something.

  They say we’ve got the Tyne running through our veins and all that shit, it’s so sentimental like. We’re a bit of a cliché. It’s rubbish but we love it. I was removed from a train by the police at 11 p.m. one night at Darlington Station for singing ‘I’m Coming Home Newcastle’. You know how it is – you’re lighting up the carriage with your banter. It was Ladies’ Day at the races at York. The whole carriage was full. It wasn’t a conscious act of rebellion. The conductor came round. I couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t like it. I thought I was a bit of a legend.

  There’s a London type, ruthles
sly aspirational, ambitious, coldhearted, mid-forties, never had a long-term partner, bitter, hardhearted, a terrible snob. The ones who are from where I’m from, but are so incredibly rude about Newcastle. Oh my god, don’t you have dentists? The fucked-up thing is what happens to them when they give up Canary Wharf, or wherever. And there they are – so driven because they’ve been scared for so long of going under. All those people, grafting their ass off, turning into people who just know how to graft.

  At 14 my oldest friend, my best friend Stacey, she ran away to London. She lived in a flat in Tower Bridge. I visited her, it was the first time I’d been to London. The escalators move quicker. It’s a fact. It’s like a fairground ride. I was with Stacey and it seemed the city was just as big as us. It all felt terribly grown-up. There I was staying at my friend’s flat. She knew the Tubes. I knew the numbers of the buses in the North-East.

  She was with a guy but it was hideously inappropriate – she was 13 when they started going out. I was very jealous. I had to go to school, get my GCSEs. I was going out with a pizza delivery boy with a metallic blue Ford Fiesta. When Stacey left it broke my heart. At various points our families had collapsed. Her mum was my mum. The street where she lived was called The Terraces – there was a metro station at the top of South Terrace. I was heartbroken after she left me at that metro station. I cried for a week. We’d ring each other; we’d watch Neighbours with each other on the phone. In London she was always on the back foot, always trying to act older, always trying not to be fazed. She acted as if it were nothing. Yeah, I’m in London, but whatever.

  Stacey was in London doing that, so I thought, I’m going to stay in Newcastle and do this. Her rebellion was London. My London was going out with a crack addict in Newcastle. My London should have been London.